Because of time and space constraints, though, I dealt with Murray and Postone (and, to a very slight degree, Sayer), rather than Arthur, so it might not quite hit on what you’re after. The revised doctoral thesis is much more likely to address what you’re after, when I get around to putting that up.

The first paper, by the way, was delivered with Chris Arthur sitting in the front row, right in front of me as I was speaking – his hand was the first up as soon as I had finished… He was very very generous – not entirely convinced, mind you, but generous nonetheless… I had very good discussions with him, which will factor into the final thesis revisions in, I think, a useful way… But talking to myself here really: point is, paper will be up in a sec…

i am reading chris arthur’s “dialectics of labour” at the moment. I am particularly interested in how your “Immanence and Materialism” paper approaches interpretations such as his where the “second order mediation” of labour’s self alienation is mapped on to the “first order mediation” of material production.

Looking forward to reading the paper – when is it going to be up?!

I know what you mean about condensing material. I often try to squeeze too much in, which just means no-one understands it but me, or else I spend long hours trying to edit it, which is exhausting. Good luck with it.

Hey lisa – The Marx & Philosophy society seems to post the papers from its events – if they don’t plan to, I’ll put the text of the talk online here. The piece for the other event is actually a sort of test run of an argument I’m writing for a chapter in a collection, so there will be a more developed version of the argument in print hopefully in the future, but again I’ll probably put the text of the talk online here.

I’m still finding it quite difficult to give a sense of how my argument “works” in short pieces. The Marx & Philosophy Society talk is around 40 minutes long, but even that requires some severe pruning and bracketing of important dimensions of the argument. The Immanence conference papers are very very short – 20 minutes – which is absolutely standard for a conference, but which is not friendly to arguments that require taking the audience/reader through multiple layers before you can reach the conclusion. I’m planning basically on writing something much longer, but only presenting a single section – one or two steps, rather than the whole argument that would be required to cash out that abstract… We’ll see how it goes…